Una Frontera Permeable: Multiple Modes of Exchange in Prehispanic Tumbes, Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cuando los senderos divergen: Reconsiderando las interacciones entre los Andes Septentrionales y los Andes Centrales durante el 1ro y 2do milenio AEC / When Paths Diverge: Reconsidering Interactions between the Northern and Central Andes, First–Second Millennium BCE" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Although the Tumbes region has been a frontier based on environmental differences, ethnolinguistic boundaries, and political divisions both in prehispanic and modern times, this frontier zone was neither rigid nor impermeable. Archaeological data dating from ca. 4700 BCE until ca. AD 1500 from Tumbes indicates exchange networks existing at multiple scales—regional, interregional, and long distance—and engaged various diverse settlements, and not solely principal centers. We propose that this long-standing, diverse, and non-centralized exchange was conducted by vendedores ambulantes, or peddlers, that complemented centralized market exchanges or political institutions. This decentralized economic exchange continues in the rural regions of Tumbes, where products such as fresh fish, furniture, and even gasoline are distributed through non-centralized networks. These less formal exchanges coexisted with state-organized production and exchange such as the manufacture and exchange of Spondylus objects produced at the Taller de Conchales at the Inca provincial center of Cabeza de Vaca, networks of exchange and interaction that permeated the Tumbes frontier.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Cuando los senderos divergen: Reconsiderando las interacciones entre los Andes Septentrionales y los Andes Centrales durante el 1ro y 2do milenio AEC / When Paths Diverge: Reconsidering Interactions between the Northern and Central Andes, First–Second Millennium BCE   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37752.0